Ways of getting together:Possible reforms in the electoral system are seldom discussed in India

Published May 12th 2004 in The Telegraph (Calcutta)

As I write this, the exit poll
results of the third phase have just been declared. These
indicate a slight improvement in the electoral fortunes of the
Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies compared to their
returns from the first two phases. Exit polls have been known
to go horribly wrong in India as well as abroad. But, to the
extent that they can be believed, it appears that the National
Democratic Alliance will perhaps fall just short of the magic
figure of 272 seats in the Lok Sabha. Atal Bihari Vajpayee
should then have no problem in cobbling together a working
majority in parliament. After all, several small parties will
gain representation in parliament, and at least some of them
can be won over with the right incentives.

Even if he fails to persuade an
adequate number of Lok Sabha members to formally join his
government, it is almost certain that an NDA government will
obtain sufficient tacit support to function for some time as a
legitimate government. The anti-NDA opposition parties will
fall so far short of a majority that they have no chance of
forming a government. And all the politicians who manage to
get elected will want the new Lok Sabha to complete its term
so that they can reap the fruits of success. So, they will
ensure that Vajpayee once again occupies the prime
minister's office. Of course, the important question is
whether the prime minister can push through any coherent
agenda for change if he is subjected to political blackmail
from coalition partners.

As many politicians and
observers have remarked, coalition governments are here to
stay. The first signs of political instability in recent times
were witnessed after the general elections in 1967, when
coalition governments were formed in several states. Many of
these governments were highly unstable. However, although the
Indian political system is formally a federal structure, most
of the effective power is concentrated at the Centre, and so
it is government stability or the lack of it in Delhi which
occupies much greater attention in public discourse. Despite
the potential for instability in the last decade -and-a-half,
Central governments in India have tended to survive. For
instance, the last Congress government with P.V. Narasimha Rao
at the helm did not have majority support, but managed to last
a full term. Similarly, the current NDA government, despite
being a patchwork of, at times, 21 parties, has overcome all
odds and exhibited remarkable longevity.

A popular misconception about
coalition governments is that they are inherently unstable.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence from around the world
which suggests that the average duration in office of
single-party majority governments is significantly larger than
that of coalition governments. However, there is considerable
variation in the duration of coalition governments, with
several coalitions showing remarkable stability.

This is particularly true in the
case of western Europe, where the evidence indicates a wide
variation in the pattern of coalition governments as well as
clear country-specific patterns -- some countries seem to
have systematically more stable governments than other
countries. For instance, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg have
been ruled more or less continually by stable coalition
administrations in the post-war period, while Italy has
witnessed relatively unstable governments. More interestingly,
Kerala has had a long history of coalition governments, some
of them serving full terms in office.

There is a growing body of
research in political science containing several competing
hypotheses about cabinet durability. One school actually
eschews attempts to identify factors that explain government
durability, believing instead that duration is essentially a
random event -- it is the occurrence of unpredictable events
which trigger governmental collapse. This belief does not
square with empirical evidence which suggests that some
governments are systematically more successful in warding off
shocks than others. At the other end of the spectrum is the "deterministic" school, which conjectures that cabinet
duration can be explained by a set of structural factors such
as the composition of the legislature or the cabinet, the
ideological positions of the parties in the cabinet, as well
as the institutional features distinguishing coalitional
processes in different countries.

Several political scientists
have suggested that the more fragmented the legislature, the
less likely it is to produce a stable government. A fragmented
legislature is one in which the distribution of seats is
dispersed amongst several parties. The more fragmented the
legislature, the greater is the number of potentially viable
coalition governments. The increase in the number of feasible
options makes the overall bargaining environment more complex.
This promotes instability because coalitions tend to break up
more easily in a complex bargaining environment since even a
minor shock may change the preference of parties regarding
their most preferred coalition.

Despite the growing tendency
towards fragmented legislatures, there is very little
discussion in India about steps which can be taken in order to
reduce fragmentation. For instance, there is hardly any debate
about possible reforms in the electoral system, which is a
crucial determinant of the type of legislature.

Conventional wisdom amongst
political scientists suggests that plurality rule or the
first-past-the-post system, which is the electoral system used
in India, is most likely to produce majority parties. Indeed,
the so-called Duverger's Law, based on empirical
regularities, states that single-member district electoral
systems, in which winners are decided by a simple plurality
rule, usually produce two-party systems.

Clearly, the electoral
experience in India does not fit this general pattern. This
suggests a need to examine why Duverger's Law has not been
vindicated in India. A possible explanation is that while this "law" implicitly assumes that the distribution of
electoral support for the various parties is uniform across
all constituencies, the Indian experience indicates that
perhaps voters care more about local issues than national
ones. This is not to deny that all voters care equally about
crucial economic issues such as prices and incomes. But there
are equally important issues which are more localized. No
national party has been able to formulate a consistent
electoral platform which addresses the multiplicity of local
issues, and that is why several regional parties have gained
electoral success, contributing to a fragmented legislature.

An attractive alternative to the
first-past-the-post system is the family of proportional
representation systems, which award seats in proportion to the
votes polled by any party. This means that PR systems tend to
be more favourable to minority groups and small parties since
the number of seats won by a party is "close" to its share
of the overall votes. This means that a "pure" PR system
is more likely to produce fragmented legislatures.

However, several countries in
western Europe use some PR system, but with the modification
that parties getting less than a stipulated fraction of the
valid votes cast in all the constituencies put together are
denied any representation in the legislature. This stipulation
obviously rules out the possibility of any independent
candidate or small parties gaining representation. Although
there have not been too many instances of single-party
majority governments in these countries, their legislatures
usually comprise of 3 or 4 relatively large parties. Moreover,
most of these governments have been formed by stable
coalitions consisting of two or three parties. An added
advantage is that these coalitions tend to be between
like-minded parties, thereby promoting coherent
decision-making.